


Ordinary

by excited_ferret



Category: Ordinary People (1980), Ordinary People - Judith Guest
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Family Drama, Family Dynamics, Gen, Grief/Mourning, How it feels to be Beth, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 09:44:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20095255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/excited_ferret/pseuds/excited_ferret
Summary: Beth wonders when she stopped being a complete person to her family.





	Ordinary

Beth wonders when she stopped being a complete person to her family. They don’t seem to believe that she can go about her everyday life, seeming cool and composed, and feel things at the same time.

Beth feels things. If she let herself stop and live in those feelings, she would never get out of bed in the morning. She barely gets out of bed now, but she refuses to make that someone else’s problem.

The trouble is, she loved Buck. She loved them all, of course, but it never occurred to her then to do otherwise. She had never known anything like the pain she felt when Buck died. And when Conrad…when he had…well. She and Calvin had gone from having two children to almost none, and Beth made up her mind then that she would not, could not go through that again. She couldn’t face another loss.

She didn’t decide not to love them. She just wanted to pull back a little. She retreated into the things she knew, the things she could control, things like shoes and ties and breakfast, not people. If she could control people, they wouldn’t have taken the boat that day. If she could control people, Conrad would be…different.

He thinks she doesn’t love him, but the fact is, Conrad is openly in pain all the time, and it scares Beth. She can’t fix it and she doesn’t know what to do about it, and she wishes he didn’t have to keep reminding her all the time about what’s missing, what’s lost, what’s inside her screaming and screaming without respite. All she wants is a way to be normal, and the three of them can’t seem to find normal anymore.

And Calvin, who should’ve known her best, looks at her like a stranger. Calvin looks at the way she keeps their home together and sees a want of feeling. If she really didn’t feel anything, she wouldn’t be trying so hard to make things nice…but of course, she’s hidden the effort she puts into things all her life. Apparently it’s been so effective that Calvin sees no effort at all.

He wants her to talk about love. She cannot let herself talk about love. And she’s beginning to understand that this is the way their lives together end.


End file.
